What They Know
by Shadowed Mediocrity
Summary: Seeing that he was awake, she ran her fingers over the edges of the ragged thing that arced like an angry strike over his features, deliberately softening the touch to something smooth and sensual, a silent taunt. [a scene before death]


**Disclaimer:** I don't own Full Metal Alchemist, although I rather assume that you know that.

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What They Know

In the unmoving period of the dying, he found that his life had begun to be interspersed with random bouts of slumber, drifting in and out so that reality became little more than a thin cloth, easily torn to see the horrors beneath.

When he woke again, it was to the sensation of her palm (warm) against his skin.

Seeing that he was awake, she ran her fingers over the edges of the ragged thing that arced like an angry strike, deliberately softening the touch to something smooth and sensual. Her strange mauve eyes (slits sharp like a cat's) followed the tracings of her fingers as though she had never seen anything so fascinating. "Does it still hurt."

He brushed her wandering hands away, giving her a very blank look. She looked strangely out of place in the room with her hair (immaculate; shining black) and a gown that fitted to her slender form like a second skin. "I will be dead soon." He said, in his brusque way. "It doesn't matter, does it. Dead men have no pain. You know that, don't you? Ah," he said flatly, "But you don't. Your kind cannot die, after all."

Withdrawing her gloved hands, she tucked them neatly at the nape of her neck in a careless gesture, staring at the ceiling amusedly from her perch atop the splintering, rickety desk.

"Ah, well, of course I know it." She said airily, ("You underestimate me.") but felt a coil of something hard at the pit of her stomach as she looked at him again.

_How do you know this? How did you know these? What have you known all your life that belongs to the soul that you no longer have?_

-

_There were memories of this, sickness from which she had nursed him when he had spat up blood and his family had despaired and his brother_ – how she had loved him, that man now rendered nameless –_ had turned to her and said o god do not take away my brother._

_So she had nursed him. There had been nothing else to be done since no one else would touch him with a twelve foot pole. But he had recovered and had sat up to smile again—_

-

The scar for which he had been named slashed across his face like a frown. He watched her with the calmness of a lack of feeling as the blood trickled from his sides and his arms and all that he had lost, like a nightmare come to life.

How ridiculous, she thought. Only humans had nightmares. And if there was anything that she wasn't, it was human. (Was what he had needed her wanted her to be.)

He did not ask her what she was thinking, but she told him anyway, with the freeness of a confessor whose partner in this confession would take her secrets to the grave unspoken.

"I was thinking of Ishbal." She said calmly. Her black hair glowed in luminescent waves through the sunlight that wavered through the window. "I was thinking of a man with glasses and a woman in a bed and a locket."

"You." He said. It was not a question.

"Me."

"Not you." And now he shook his head (early gray, with colors still beneath that made her remember, suddenly, what she had never known; the feeling of a man's hair between her fingers, parting it like underbrush to peer at the tender scalp). He was dying; there was no time for these great theological debates, and yet he found himself wanting to stay all the same, stay with this woman who looked like the one for whom his brother had thrown everything away, stay with this Homunculus who promised him the world if only he would complete a single task for her. "You are soulless." _She was not_.

"I know." She said, and smiled. But still she did not call upon her resources to finish him, (her Envy - mad, sharp Envy - and her Gluttony who seemed like to go mad for lack of her) only sat, slender limbs tucked neatly into the circle of her arms as she watched his life seep away by inches.

"Do you—enjoy this?" He spoke with the gritty tones of iron control, his voice coming out as a half-rasp, though its familiar baritone had not faded entirely. It was not an accusation, though close. "Watching men suffer, die before your eyes?"

She said nothing, only watched him with the alert wariness of an animal. After a few moments, she reached out to touch his cheek. As his lip pulled back from his teeth in a snarl, however, she only smiled wanly, withdrew her hand, and returned to the desk to wait.

-

_The fever, she said. It will break._

_It won't. He said with something like despair and the beginnings of hysteria. That stupid boy – I told him not to go out into the desert for such periods of time—_

_It will break. She said. I know this._

_He smiled wanly, teasingly. How do you know this, love? Do you know this the way you know what the stars are and how they guide you? Do you know this the way you know that our God looks out for you?_

_I know this, she wanted to say, the way I know I love you. But something choked her throat and kept her with a still smile until he went away again._

_When she woke the morning next, his fever had broken. He rose with a grunt and a nod of clumsy thanks as he stumbled out the flap of the tent. She watched out after him long after he had gone, and did not know why._

-

"Do you know," she said, "that you are going to die?"

She spoke contemplatively, without condemnation or care. Her eyes focused on the horizon and the brightness of the sun (unflinching) stared past him as though he were only a ghost, and perhaps not even that.

He grunted. "I'm dying." He said impassively, leaning against the wall (the back of his favorite green robe stained with crimson fading to sticky black). "Even if I didn't know it, it wouldn't matter. Dead is dead."

"But how can you live with that knowledge?" Her look seemed only mildly curious, as though she asked for concern of him, rather than to satiate her own interest in mortality. "Will you just die without fighting it, lying there in acceptance?"

"It all passes as the God wills. Besides, don't you believe in the afterlife?"

"Believe." She echoed, and turned to study him for signs of mockery. "That is a human pastime, a human invention. How do you _know_—"

"I _know_," He said with the low anger of fierceness. As though, she thought with an odd, bleak tenderness (like sadness like love), he cared. "I know it the way I know that—" He broke off abruptly, his red eyes fading to blankness again. It was clear that he did not intend to complete his sentence.

But somehow, she thought that she could guess what he had been about to say.

-fin-

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Author's Note: I won't try to excuse this piece by saying that it's my first FMA fanfic. Suffice to say that feedback would be appreciated, crit especially. 

And in case you're curious and didn't guess, this is a scene between Scar and Lust.


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